Where those associated with Western films from around the world are laid to rest.

Saturday, October 5, 2013

RIP Carlo Lizzani

Italian neorealist film director and screenwriter who
made Last Days of Mussolini, starring Rod Steiger.

John Francis LaneThe Guardian
Tuesday 15 October 2013 09.53 EDT

Carlo Lizzani, who has died aged 91, after falling from a
balcony at his home, was a screenwriter and director of Italian neorealist
cinema who made more than 40 feature films, as well as documentaries and
television series.

His first professional experiences in the film world were
as an actor, playing cameos in two powerful neorealist films: Il Sole Sorge
Ancora (The Sun Still Rises, 1946), directed by Aldo Vergano; and Caccia
Tragica (Tragic Hunt, 1947), Giuseppe De Santis's first feature film.

In 1947 Roberto Rossellini summoned Lizzani to Berlin
where he was preparing to shoot Germania Anno Zero (Germany Year Zero). Lizzani
did research with East German locals which Rossellini would find useful when
the film was being made without a definitive shooting script. Lizzani said
later: "Rossellini filmed the story of the boy [Edmund] as if growing up
under nazism had been a plague with which he and his family had been infected
and from which they had difficulty recovering. For me it was a lesson in how to
make realism seem real."

His next lesson in cinema came from De Santis, who
employed him as a writer on Riso Amaro (Bitter Rice, 1949), which taught him
how even an erotic melodrama could have deep social significance and be popular
with audiences, which most neorealist films failed to be. For Bitter Rice, he
shared an Oscar nomination for best writing with De Santis.

Lizzani had an idea for a film he wanted to direct but
could not find a producer prepared to take a risk on a movie about partisans in
Genoa. He would make Achtung! Banditi! (Attention! Bandits!) in 1951 thanks to
the enthusiasm of workers in Genoa who formed a co-operative and obtained help
from the Communist party. It was a success, helped perhaps by the appealing
presence of the young Gina Lollobrigida, not yet a star, in the female lead.

He was born in Rome and while at university took part in
the resistance. In 1942 he joined the Communist party. He became a critic for
the film journal Cinema and for the Communist party's postwar newspaper Unità.
One of his first documentaries would be about the charismatic party leader
Palmiro Togliatti's return to Italy from exile in the Soviet Union.

In 1953 Lizzani founded a co-operative to produce his
adaptation of a novel by the Florentine writer Vasco Pratolini, Cronache di
Poveri Amanti (A Tale of Poor Lovers), set in Florence in the early years of
fascism and filmed superbly in black and white. The cast included Marcello
Mastroianni in one of his first dramatic roles.

Lizzani never became, or aspired to be, an auteur.
"I use the cinema to help me live my own life, to get to know my country
and the world," he said, and was never ashamed to make popular films. He
would change genre willingly, because he enjoyed experimenting. He made a zany
comedy, Lo Svitato (The Screwball, 1956), with Dario Fo, then known only as a
Milanese cabaret artist, who gave a scintillating performance. The film was a
flop and Fo gave up his aspirations to become a movie actor.

Lizzani was commissioned to make the documentary La
Muraglia Cinese (The Chinese Wall, 1958) in China, where he was disillusioned
by Maoism. After the Soviet invasion of Hungary, he had left the Italian
Communist party but remained a convinced leftist and rejoined when Enrico
Berlinguer became party secretary in 1972 (and in 1984 Lizzani would make
L'Addio a Enrico Berlinguer, a moving film about Berlinguer's funeral in the
streets of Rome).

In 1960 he made Il Gobbo (The Hunchback) about an
inhabitant of the slums of Rome (played by Gérard Blain) who became a hero of
the resistance. In 1963 came Il Processo di Verona (The Verona Trial), one of
his most appreciated films, in which Silvana Mangano gave an outstanding
performance as Edda Mussolini, the dictator's daughter, married to Count
Galeazzo Ciano, who was accused of betraying Il Duce and executed in 1944.

Lizzani's La Vita Agra (The Bitter Life, 1964) starred
Ugo Tognazzi as a provincial anarchist entrusted with blowing up a skyscraper
in Milan. After an entertaining spaghetti western, Requiescant (1967, in which
Pier Paolo Pasolini played a cameo role), he directed I Banditi di Milano
(Bandits in Milan, 1968), starring Gian Maria Volonté, about a terrifying bank
robbery.

In 1972 Lizzani was convinced by Dino De Laurentiis to go
to the US to make the mafia story Crazy Joe (1974). In return, De Laurentiis
produced one of Lizzani's most impressive historical films, Mussolini Ultimo
Atto (Last Days of Mussolini), in which Rod Steiger was convincing in a
dramatic reconstruction of the Duce's attempt to escape to the Swiss border
with his mistress Clara Petacci (Lisa Gastoni).

In 1979 Lizzani became director of the Venice film
festival, which had been in the doldrums, and succeeded during his four-year
term in giving it back its prestige. In 1988 he was awarded the festival's gold
medal for Caro Gorbaciov (Dear Gorbachev). Lizzani was a jury member at the
Berlin film festival in 1994. His last feature for the cinema was Hotel Meina
(2008), another reconstruction of Nazi persecutions.

In 2007 he published an autobiography, Il Mio Lungo
Viaggio nel Secolo Breve (Long Journey Through the Short Century), the title a
homage to the historian Eric Hobsbawm, of whom he was a fervent admirer.

Lizzani's wife, Edith, and their two children, Francesco
and Flaminia, survive him.

About Me

Born in Toledo, Ohio in 1946 I have a BA degree in American History from Cal St. Northridge. I've been researching the American West and western films since the early 1980s and visiting filming sites in Spain and the U.S.A. Elected a member of the Spaghetti Western Hall of Fame 2010.